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“At this point, if you mean the web when Tim Berners-Lee invented it, right now that web does not exist,” Scott said. “Not really. News organizations k

“At this point, if you mean the web when Tim Berners-Lee invented it, right now that web does not exist,” Scott said. “Not really. News organizations kill old articles, YouTube’s old videos go away. And while the Archive and other entities are saving—quote-unquote saving—these sites, even those will go to new URLs. They won’t be in the same place. You’ll have to search for them... There are success stories. But meanwhile, silently, thousands of useful things are disappearing. As time goes on, I have even less and less hope for how long it will last. I can't find any evidence of TimBL ever having any particularly grand intentions regarding the WWW, especially not anything in the like of content replication. In fact, if you read TimBL and Robert Caillau's 1990 proposal for the "WorldWideWeb" [1], you will find it to be a textbook example of worse-is-better with a limited scope, mostly a way of unifying CERN's documents from a physical hierarchy into a minimum viable networked web of nodes. The project objectives were indeed rather humble, and it overall appeared to be a way of bringing the general gist of TimBL's earlier hypertext research with ENQUIRE over the by-then established TCP/IP and DNS in the absolute quickest way possible. Compare and contrast with Ted Nelson and Xanadu. [1] http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html

williamcotton 11y ago
You make a good point by showing that worse-is-better is probably the way to get there rather than trying to solve everything at once, but I bet when all is said and done we have something that looks a lot closer to Xanadu than the WorldWideWeb!
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  You make a good point by showing that worse-is-better is probably the way to get there rather than trying to solve everything at once I did not make any such claim, and I do not advocate for any view resembling that in the slightest. I bet when all is said and done we have something that looks a lot closer to Xanadu than the WorldWideWeb If you have read Nelson's writings (e.g. Xanalogical Structure), you will know the two models are fundamentally irreconcilable.
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    Or perhaps the web has always been a broken model and in practice it has begun to turn in to a hypertext systems more along the lines of Xanadu! I see projects like Open Publish and IPFS as piecemeal attempts to build Xanadu-like systems on top of the existing web infrastructure. https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs "The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing." - The Rise of "Worse is Better" I've always thought that Xanadu was the "right thing" and that the web was "worse-is-better", and that's why the web was successful, but I'm sorry that I put words in your mouth, I was just trying to be agreeable!
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      IPFS looks good, but it's quite antithetical to Xanadu. It's more akin to a Plan 9 or Gopher idea of networked file systems, but backed by content addressable storage and a name service. Xanadu is the very anathema of that. OpenPublish just looks like a simple insertion tool for a distributed public ledger (i.e. the blockchain). There's not an actual "system" to it. Worse-is-better is (ironically) hard to get right, because, as it turns out, designing systems so that they can be properly evolved from 50% of the right thing to 90% of the right thing is almost as difficult as building it correctly in the first place. (I don't think IPFS is even about hypertext or hypermedia per se, so much as content distribution which then would be interpreted by whatever local reader is relevant. I do not think it has any intrinsic understanding of hypertext.)
      - williamcotton 11y ago
        Open Publish has a lot more going on that just that single repo! There's a whole suite of supporting services for interfacing with the blockchain, parsing the blockchain, creating transactions. https://github.com/blockai https://github.com/blockai One piece that we're using in production and hopefully publicly releasing soon is the state engine that turns blockchain transactions in to a state of asset ownership. We run our own public access state engine endpoint behind this module so anyone can query about published documents or ownership here: https://github.com/blockai/openpublish-state https://github.com/blockai/openpublish-state We built another service called Bitstore, a content-addressable cloud storage web service that uses Bitcoin public key infrastructure for authentication and payment, and it pairs nicely. https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client I'm on Freenode as "williamcotton". You can msg me and I'll give you a link to our staging server to show you the full system. As for how IPFS relates to Xanadu, IPFS is very much interested in the "permanent web": https://neocities.org/permanent-web https://neocities.org/permanent-web "Where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the origins of every quotation; and in which there is a valid copyright system-- a literary, legal and business arrangement-- for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount." http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html Open Publish is an attempt to build a content-addressable copyright system that pairs with the content-addressable delivery system that IPFS is building with the hopes to create something along the lines of what Ted Nelson was envisioning. BTW, BitTorrent is another great example of a related content-addressable delivery system. Content-addressable systems are at the root of Xanadu-like systems and it seems like the web is headed that way!

williamcotton 11y ago

You make a good point by showing that worse-is-better is probably the way to get there rather than trying to solve everything at once, but I bet when all is said and done we have something that looks a lot closer to Xanadu than the WorldWideWeb!

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
You make a good point by showing that worse-is-better is probably the way to get there rather than trying to solve everything at once I did not make any such claim, and I do not advocate for any view resembling that in the slightest. I bet when all is said and done we have something that looks a lot closer to Xanadu than the WorldWideWeb If you have read Nelson's writings (e.g. Xanalogical Structure), you will know the two models are fundamentally irreconcilable.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  Or perhaps the web has always been a broken model and in practice it has begun to turn in to a hypertext systems more along the lines of Xanadu! I see projects like Open Publish and IPFS as piecemeal attempts to build Xanadu-like systems on top of the existing web infrastructure. https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs "The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing." - The Rise of "Worse is Better" I've always thought that Xanadu was the "right thing" and that the web was "worse-is-better", and that's why the web was successful, but I'm sorry that I put words in your mouth, I was just trying to be agreeable!
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    IPFS looks good, but it's quite antithetical to Xanadu. It's more akin to a Plan 9 or Gopher idea of networked file systems, but backed by content addressable storage and a name service. Xanadu is the very anathema of that. OpenPublish just looks like a simple insertion tool for a distributed public ledger (i.e. the blockchain). There's not an actual "system" to it. Worse-is-better is (ironically) hard to get right, because, as it turns out, designing systems so that they can be properly evolved from 50% of the right thing to 90% of the right thing is almost as difficult as building it correctly in the first place. (I don't think IPFS is even about hypertext or hypermedia per se, so much as content distribution which then would be interpreted by whatever local reader is relevant. I do not think it has any intrinsic understanding of hypertext.)
    - williamcotton 11y ago
      Open Publish has a lot more going on that just that single repo! There's a whole suite of supporting services for interfacing with the blockchain, parsing the blockchain, creating transactions. https://github.com/blockai https://github.com/blockai One piece that we're using in production and hopefully publicly releasing soon is the state engine that turns blockchain transactions in to a state of asset ownership. We run our own public access state engine endpoint behind this module so anyone can query about published documents or ownership here: https://github.com/blockai/openpublish-state https://github.com/blockai/openpublish-state We built another service called Bitstore, a content-addressable cloud storage web service that uses Bitcoin public key infrastructure for authentication and payment, and it pairs nicely. https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client I'm on Freenode as "williamcotton". You can msg me and I'll give you a link to our staging server to show you the full system. As for how IPFS relates to Xanadu, IPFS is very much interested in the "permanent web": https://neocities.org/permanent-web https://neocities.org/permanent-web "Where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the origins of every quotation; and in which there is a valid copyright system-- a literary, legal and business arrangement-- for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount." http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html Open Publish is an attempt to build a content-addressable copyright system that pairs with the content-addressable delivery system that IPFS is building with the hopes to create something along the lines of what Ted Nelson was envisioning. BTW, BitTorrent is another great example of a related content-addressable delivery system. Content-addressable systems are at the root of Xanadu-like systems and it seems like the web is headed that way!